Graffiti epigraphy

BROOKLYN COLLEGE: History Professor Studies Ancient Graffiti in Late Antiquity Burials.

For Karen B. Stern, making her way through the ancient tunnels and caves of ancient mortuary complexes in Israel is all in an ordinary day's research. Her goal is to find and study carvings—pictures and texts—inscribed at the burial sites, carvings that the history professor calls graffiti, because unlike epitaphs, the inscriptions were made after the tombs or monuments were finished. Some of these carvings date back more than 2,000 years. Many are crudely executed. Still, they are no less important to the field of archeology.

Considered, until recently, a form of defacement or desecration, the graffiti in mortuary complexes were part of a more acceptable and widespread cultural practice than archaeologists originally suspected, contends Stern, who obtained her Ph.D. in religious studies from Brown University in 2008.

"Had they been considered a defacement by the people of that era they could've been easily removed." Instead they went untouched, leaving to posterity dedications that memorialize the dead, curses inscribed as warning to people who wanted to pillage or desecrate tombs, and even the names of rabbis mentioned in both Jewish and early Christian writings.

While her interest was originally sparked by graffiti found at the synagogue discovered at the Roman outpost of Dura-Europos in today's Syria, Stern, who has received a 2014 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities—has done much of her research at Beth She'arim, a vast necropolis carved in the hills near Haifa, in northwest Israel. Its subterranean chambers, once accessed by steps and pathways, contain hundreds of burials from Roman Palestine and its surroundings.

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For an article by Prof. Stern on her work at Dura Europos, see here. And for an interview with her and more on her work at Beit She'arim, see here.